gotmilk, in short: it is possible, everything is possible. I would appreciate this "baking" function too. Also with material merging (one mesh with one texture atlas) because then is rendering performance truly maximized. BUT, please don't expect this from me in near future.

clear?

thank you thank you thank you. That's all I wanted to know. I knew it was possible, but I also knew that there was a little reason for someone to code it.

I got 2534 draw calls batched down to 132. I did it because in VR fps need to be minimum at 90fps. I am not familiar how Mafia engine works but maybe there is a way to reverse engineer this. You could easily get all the baked meshes and textures out of Unity project file. Of course I am not sure how Mafia engine would handle this.

Good luck with your studies. And thank you again for confirming. Since i now know that you have no near term plans for this and they author of MWE does not also plan to develop this functionality, the only way to go forward is by manually placing them and using editor only as a visual reference. I am glad that I asked.

With Unity one could give a fantastic visual overhaul to the entire city.

The Lost Heaven VR recreation would still need a high powered PC because commercial headsets will hold two (one for each eye) 1920x1200 90hz panels and the game has to run minimum at 90fps in order to avoid stuttering that happens on low persitance VR screens. And it has to do it on both screens at the same time.

But we could easily bake most of the meshes into groups and textures into several atlases. Luckily geometry is simple and textures are quite low. So reaching 90fps on a big world like that would not be a problem. Also Unity has other tools that could help to bring life back to city. https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/22765 It is quite easy to use.

But back to reality
Currently to have a city one has to do it by hand. I went over the buildings and there are not that many of them. I would probably be able to get all the buildings in 2 months by importing and placing them manually. But there are also a lot of other details. Trees, lamps, signs and etc. These details are in thousands and would take another 4 months of tedious work just to place them. So it would be 6 months of manual labour before one could actually start working on building the application. This is something that i want to do very badly and if i was 10 years younger i would do it in heartbeat. But at this moment all my time is going to keep my VR dev business alive and i will probably not going to work on this at the moment. At least now i am aware of the technical challenges.

MWE and Sandbox are both wonderful tools. Sad part is that they almost do what needs to be done. They both are able to read the bin reference and lay out all its data correctly in the editor. Of course reading the data and trying bake and export them into another format is totally different beast. A beast that does not even need to exist if you just want to mod it on the Mafia engine (which is 13 years old technology)

Sorry for derailing with this post. I hope it was interesting to someone. Editor is a fantastic tool and i will still keep an eye for it. Who know what might happen in few years.

Wow this is super-awesome. Great job !
I was quite surprised to see that mafia still has a lot of players and modders, but this is beyond any expectation.
I downloaded the preview version, but I can't display occluders (box is greyed)
Is this normal ? I would like to make a non-performance-killing version of unlimited drawing distance mod (maybe a python script modifying all the scene2.bin and cache.bin), and this feature would be very useful to identify which occluders to delete and which ones to keep.

Is there a way to convert the map? and open it up in 3ds max? or with something?

I'm working on an Mafia 1 port to GTA IV and my first try was on Mafia World Editor ripping the map with 3D Ripper DX.
I had problems by the textures when they were adressed by the memory so you could not recnotize any texture on what its used.
I also made problems at combining the maps.
Join the Discord server if anyone can help me out: https://discord.gg/pjkHKAT_________________